Thursday, November 9, 2017

Catastrophic computer failure at automation publication.

As a result of a normal upgrade of Windows 10, the computer on which Spitzer & Boyes makes the Industrial Automation & Process Control INSIDER (IAI) has suffered a catastrophic failure. We usually highlight each issue on our home page.

Walt Boyes, the editor advises, "According to the repair shop, it isn’t worth repairing, so they are taking the data off for us. It will take about a week to get the data back, and so we have decided to produce an October/November issue at the end of November."

In the meantime they are going to try something different.

Over the next week or so, they intend to post some of the articles that would be in the October issue on the IAI blog, on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, for everyone to read, whether a subscriber or not.

"If you find that you like what you’ll be seeing, you can become a subscriber by visiting the site. Individual subscriptions are quite reasonable, and large company subscriptions that allow circulation to all within the company are also available."

As a user of a different sort of computer we might, somewhat facetiously, have a word of advice for them. "Buy a MAC." In almost thirty years of publishing we have only had one catastrophic failure but that was an act of God aided by our carelessness - a lightning strike at 3.00 one morning. We quickly replaced it - amazingly it was covered by insurance - and were back on line. We now fully protected through two surge protecting devices - one for the computer and another for the modem.